Israel needs an Irony Dome

It boggles the mind to think that a determined, Jew-hating terror army would fire more than 1,000 rockets at Israel over seven days and inflict so few casualties.

I wonder what must be going through the minds of those Hamas terrorists right now: “We lost half of our arsenal and what do we have to show for it? Where are all the dead Jews? How is this possible?”

Well, the answers, my friends, are blowing in the wind.

These answers have come in the form of sleek seeing-eye missiles that met up with incoming Hamas missiles and … killed them.

To get an idea of this miracle, imagine a bullet hitting another bullet. You might as well split the Red Sea.

We had the Six-Day War and the Yom Kippur War; this one may go down in history as the Iron Dome War. The war when technology rescued the Jews, when Startup Nation became Shoot-Down Nation.

But with all the brilliance of these missiles, the fact is, just like miracle drugs, they deal with symptoms but not root causes.

The root cause behind the 1,000 missiles launched at Israel is deep-seated Jew-hatred, and no Iron Dome can shoot that down.

In Gaza, Jew-hatred is a valuable commodity that keeps corrupt leaders in power. As long as they keep their people focused on hating the Zionist enemy, they get to keep their millionaire villas.

How many Hamas millionaires are there who regularly loot public funds? According to a report in the Jerusalem Post, professor Ahmed Karima of Al-Azhar University in Egypt estimates there are no less than 1,200 millionaires among the Hamas elite.

Yes, those millionaires were surely among the cowards hiding in their well-fortified rocket bunkers while ordering Palestinian families to stay on the firing line of Israeli bombs.

“Here’s the difference between us,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Fox News on July 13. “We’re using missile defense to protect our civilians, and they’re using their civilians to protect their missiles.”

The corrupt cowards of Hamas know that the more Palestinians that are killed, the more sympathy they can expect from the world, and the more local Jew-hatred they can drum up.

Imagine that — so called “leaders” who build hundreds of tunnels to protect themselves and their missiles, but no bomb shelters to protect their own people.

Look, if I were a Palestinian living through the Israeli offensive in Gaza, I would also see Israel as a big, bad wolf. I would also hate Israel and blame it for the tragic deaths of Palestinian civilians.

But who’s really to blame for these deaths? Who is using civilians as human shields? Who launched bombs indiscriminately at Israeli civilians knowing full well it would trigger counter attacks?

This is the simple truth of Gaza: The biggest enemy of the people is not Israel but Hamas. It is Hamas that refused to build a decent society for its people when it had the chance. It is Hamas that chose hate over life.

Is there anyone who doubts that Israel would have welcomed a friendly, neighborly state in Gaza?

This is why, once this war is over, Israel will need a new offensive that has nothing to do with missiles and everything to do with message. Israel should launch a second army called the IMF — the Israel Message Forces.

This army should be tasked with getting this one overriding message across to Palestinians, whether through leaflets, social networks or clandestine media:

Israel is not your enemy.

Your enemies are your own leaders, who steal public money for their lavish lifestyles while keeping you in misery; who blame everything on the Jews and on Israel to divert attention from their own failures; who attack Israel to provoke counterattacks that hurt your families, while they hide in bunkers.

Israel would love nothing more than to see you prosper in peace and security. If you have leaders who will stop destroying and start creating, we can help you on this new journey.

Sure, it may take a very long time for this message to register, but we need to plant the seeds now and expose Hamas for who they truly are — cowards who have abandoned their own people.

Believe me, with my own two daughters in Israel going in and out of bomb shelters last week, I blessed every missile of the Iron Dome. But while these missiles neutralized Hamas rockets, they didn’t neutralize the Hamas message of hate and destruction.

As long as this Jew-hatred lives in Palestinian hearts, the weeds of terror will always grow back.

It’s time for a new Iron Dome that launches missiles of truth and reconciliation. We can call it the Irony Dome, the irony being that the real enemy of the Palestinians is not Israel but their own leaders.

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